Mann on Splices: the Case of Crowley and Lowery

Yesterday I waded through a demonstration of a fairly egregious splice of the instrumental record into Crowley’s reconstruction as used in Crowley [2000]. Today I consider the use of the Crowley reconstruction in spaghetti graphs and, in particular, Mann’s statement at realclimate that:

No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, "grafted the thermometer record onto" any reconstruction. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation websites) appearing in this forum.

Mann and realclimate are obviously pretty quick to dismiss any opponents as simply being "industry-funded climate disinformation", but I grew up in era when people talked about "running dogs of the capitalist imperialists" so the mentality of such comments is easy to recognize, just as the Marcusian overtones of "false objectivity".

Anyway here are some curiosities from Mann’s own treatment of the Crowley series, which provides evidence that Mann knew that Crowley had carried out exactly this form of splice.

Update Dec 2, 2005: Tim Lambert has suggested that this series may actually be some variant of MBH99 incorrectly labelled. A reader has sent in a digital version of the series labelled "Crowley and Lowery" here

Update. March 26, 2006. If Mann incorrectly used a displaced version of MBH99 and labelled it as Crowley and Lowery, as Lambert believes see below -, then this screw-up should have been reported to EOS and a corrigendum issued. To date, no such corrigendum has been issued. To my knowledge, Lambert has not written to EOS to confirm this screw-up. It is beyond question that Crowley spliced data in exactly the way that Mann said that "no researcher, to [his] knowledge, had ever done". Obviously, Mann, as the lead author for IPCC TAR on these multiproxy studies, should have been aware of this splicing. Lambert suggests that it is possible that, in addition to screwing up the EOS graph, Mann may have failed to inform himself properly about the Crowley splice; in that case, Lambert believes that Mann’s quote above could be based on ignorance and a failure to take proper care rather than deceit. This is an alternative possible explanation.

First let’s look at the spaghetti graph in Mann et al [EOS 2003]. It’s hard to distinguish details in these spaghetti graphs, but I’ve looked closely at this one in a blow-up mode. The Crowley version (yellow) is almost certainly the version CL2.Jns11, made from splicing the CRU temperature after 1870 until 1998 (smoothed to a 1993 end) with the 13-site composite prior to 1870. In the unspliced version (CL2), the Crowley reconstruction is higher than the instrumental CRU record in the 19th century and joins up with it only in the late 19th century. While it is hard to see, the CL series used here definitely tracks the instrumental series, as is the case with the spliced CL2.Jns11 version.

Figure1 . Spaghetti Diagram, Mann et al. [Eos 2003].

Courtesy of a climateaudit reader, here is a parsing of the Eos Spaghetti diagram, showing the Crowley layer extracted. You’ll see that my surmise is correct and how that the Crowley version here is clearly the long splice.

Figure1A . Spaghetti Diagram, Mann et al. [Eos 2003].

Now let’s look at the spaghetti graph in Jones and Mann [2004], from about 6 months later. Here Crowley-Lowery (2000) is in black. Jones and Mann[2004] appear to have used the version CL2.Jnsm11.adjusted, which is also spliced but is only spliced from 1965 on rather than the longer splice from 1870 on the other version. The evidence is that here the Crowley version intersects the CRU version halfway through the 19th century, which matches the smoothed short splice rather than the long splice.

Figure 2. Spaghetti Diagram, Jones and Mann [2004]

Now let’s look at the caption to Jones and Mann [2004]:

Original Legend: Reconstructions of (a) Northern Hemisphere (NH), (b) Southern Hemisphere (SH), and (c) global mean (GLB) annual temperatures over the past one to two millennia. The expansion in Figure 5a compares a number of different NH estimates over the past 1000 years, while the main plot shows the proxy reconstructions back to A.D. 200 of Mann and Jones [2003], updated through 1995 as described in the text. Smoothed (40-year low-passed) versions of these series are shown to highlight the low-frequency variations. … Shown also (yellow shading) is the 95% confidence interval in the reconstruction (i.e., the positive and negative 2 standard error limits of the smoothed reconstructions). The various other (smoothed) NH reconstructions shown in the enlargement to Figure 5a have been scaled by linear regression against the smoothed instrumental NH series over the common interval 1856″€œ1980, with the exception of the “‘œ”‘œBriffa et al.” series, which has been scaled over the shorter 1856″€œ1940 interval owing to a decline in temperature response in the underlying data discussed elsewhere [Briffa et al., 1998a]. The Crowley and Lowery [2000] series shown here replaces an incorrect version of the series shown in similar previous comparisons [e.g., Mann et al., 2003a]. [my bold]

So what was "incorrect" about the Crowley version used in "similar previous comparisons" – that it was splice of the instrumental record? Was this "industry-funded climate disinformation"? Who needs disinformation with this gang that can’t shoot straight? All you need to do is show what they actually do – that’s damning enough.

The graphic to Jones and Mann [2004] was submitted by MBH to Nature in their Reply to our submission to Nature. It included the following different legend, which I noticed in my notes and which I’ll try to remember to discuss some day.

Legend from SuppInfo4 to MBH 2004b FIGURE 1: Reprinted from Jones and Mann (2004). Reconstructions of different proxy-based NH estimates (9-14) over the past 1000 years, smoothed on 40 year and longer timescales. Shown also (yellow shading) is the 95% confidence interval for (14). The various other reconstructions have been scaled by linear regression against the smoothed instrumental NH series over the common interval 1856″€œ1980, with the exception of (12), which has been scaled over the shorter 1856″€œ1940 interval owing to a late 20th century decline in temperature response in some of the underlying data discussed elsewhere (12). Series (10) represents the extension of MBH98 back to AD 1000. Each of these reconstructions are based on entirely independent statistical methodologies from MBH98, and either completely (Esper et al), almost completely (Briffa et al, Crowley and Lowery), or mostly (Mann and Jones, Jones et al) independent data. [my bold]

Given that, for example, 13 of 17 proxies in Jones et al were used in MBH98-99 and a 14th (Jacoby NH) was used in its 11 components in MBH98-99, I don’t see that this is "mostly independent" data, but – hey, this is Hockey Team-speak.

151 Comments

Well, the data was as independent as their ability to think independently.

Sometimes Mann’s and other statements about the “industry-funded misinformation” looks truly entertaining, especially for those of us whom the communists tried to educate by their propaganda.

We have had a lot of very reasonable teachers at the basic school (and a smaller number at the high school) who knew a lot of stuff about the real world, market economy, and what were the actual differences between the West and the East.

But there were some either dumb or fundamentalist teachers (or both) as well as pupils – often ones from the communist families – who really believed that the difference between capitalism and socialism is that the imperialists are exploiting everyone else; the imperialist corporations make the life of the ordinary people unbearable, and so forth.

Many statements of various Manns sound exactly the same way as if someone tried to humiliate the hockey team by comparing its members to those not too smart pupils who believed the communist propaganda. However, the reality is that Mann apparently thinks that by expressing the “idea” that everything funded by the industry must be wrong, and everything wrong must be funded by the industry, and the idea that all scientific questions should be reduced to simple political slogans addressed to not-too-demanding voters, he becomes an intellectual superstar.

Well, I would rather choose the label “complete idiot” but everyone is allowed to think whatever she wants about this issue.

Incidentally, it would be nice if the industry finally offered me at least a penny, after the years of waiting. 😉

Luboà…⟬ another Czech expat who’s interested in climate is Klemeà…⟻ you’d like his work. (I hope that you’re impressed with my alt-0154’s in this posting.) Not in reference to anything in particular, I’ve read quite a few novels by Josef Skvorecky, who’s a Czech ex-pat who lived in Toronto for a long time. I thought that he was a very talented novelist.

Each of these reconstructions are based on entirely independent statistical methodologies from MBH98, and either completely (Esper et al), almost completely (Briffa et al, Crowley and Lowery), or mostly (Mann and Jones, Jones et al) independent data.

Perhaps MBH should prepare a glossary so that we can follow their logic.

Let’s see, does one new proxy mean “mostly independent”; two new proxies means “almost completely independent”; and three new proxies means “completely independent”; and four new proxies means “entirely independent”?

I guess that I have been wrong all along. I was always under the impression that something was either independent or it was dependent.

I think that we are completely aware than RealClimate is trying to create its own reality in the classic propaganda style of the Communists.

I wonder what Michael Mann would make of the news that the largest named corporate sponsor of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) was….Exxon Mobil (in the >$100,000 bracket no less). Will Michael Mann be discounting everything produced by the AGU now that its been tainted by oil-stained lucre that will never, ever wash off? Of course this dread plague has affected all of its members and invalidates anything they say…

I’m getting very disturbed as I get older by the alteration of language for political purposes: partisan politics, environmental groups, business lobbyists, the Bush White House, special interest groups of every kind use the same words while modifying the dictionary.

Michael Mann is clearly very bright. When he stops trying to suppress the unsuppressible requirement to check, replicate, falsify and clarify that which is real from that which is wishful thinking, sloppy experiment, poorly controlled and error-strewn that is the work of the scientific method, then we might make a start.

He’s got his head crammed in a very narrow box trying to ignore the world around him, and only he can take his head out.

Herbert Marcuse, a popular Marxist philosopher of the 1960’s. ‘By virtue of the way it has organized its technological base, contemporary industrial society tends to be totalitarian. For “totalitarian” is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.’ You get the idea. cf , Lubos Motol.

I’d be inclined to emphasize a different nuance. I hate to waste brain cells on Marcusian drivel: as I recall, he argued that there was such thing as “democratic totalitarianism” which was even worse than other forms of totalitarianism. It flourished because people thought that they were free, but their tastes and wants had been coerced by the military-corporate imperialists – hence false consciousness. Lots of quotes from Hegel and other longwinded German philosophers – the more longwinded the better.

As something useful, I’ve added a new graphic courtesy of a CA reader, which shows the layering of the Eos2003 graphic – the Crowley verion can be seen clearly illustrating my previous point precisely.

I think that counting is a pretty basic part of maths and Lubos doesn’t seem to have mastered it. Four year olds know that to get an accurate count you should just count each thing once unlike what Lubos did. If you check his Google search you will find that there are not 38 articles that contain the phrase “industry-funded” at realclimate, but two: once in reference to Myron Ebell and once in reference to Steve Milloy.

The google search provided by Luboà…⟠yields 38 hits for industry-funded: “Results 21 – 30 of about 38 from *.realclimate.org for industry-funded.” The term is mentioned in the boilerplate on several occasions and in the articles or comments to pages 7,8,10,11,22,73,148,167,188,199 and 211 – a total of 12, counting the boilerplate. I haven’t checked whether the term is in the article or the comments.

The most interesting point is the frequency of the term at realclimate, as opposed to whether the 38 mentions occur in 38 different articles. Go, you Golden Bears.

I actually wrote a paragraph in Marcusian style in my discussion of Zhu [1973] , which contained many genuflections to Chairman Mao, which some might say were not totally relevant to an article on paleoclimate, such as:

It was only after the liberation of China in 1949 under the leadership of the Communist Party of China with the establishment of numerous factories, people’s communes and research institutes that science began to forge ahead by leaps and bounds. But more important than that, the teachings of Chairman Mao Tsetung have set free the bounds of authoritarianism of the senior scientists and a new generation of young men of science has begun to sprout up which makes the prospect of future advancement of science full of promise.

I wrote the following paragraph in a Marcusian style up to the last few phrases – the Marcusianism of which was undoubtedly lost on younger readers.

By applying the lessons of dialectical materialism, Mannianism with its reification of unchanging climate in historical times stands revealed as a projection of the reification of contemporary class structures as absolute rather than being the product of class struggle in a process of dialectical materialism. Thus, Mannianism is an adventurist version of petty bourgeois Hannianism of a century ago. Or perhaps not. Perhaps the above sentence means something. Or perhaps not.

Re #15:
It’s really interesting that Tim the Golden Bear should mention the number 38 – he was obviously drawn to it like a magnet. The number triggered subconscious drives which Tim could not resist; "Yer honor, I was an automaton". So why is the number 38 of particular interest to Tim? I’ll give you a clue: It’s a rounded up version (within 0.1%) of the exact number. Someone indulge me with at least a guess. The answer is fun.

The term “industry-funded” occurs in just two articles at realclimate, not 38 as Lubos claimed. Steve attempts to obscure this fact by counting uses in comments that wre not written by the realclimate people.

In any case, Steve’s claim that Mann and realclimate are are quick to dismiss any opponents as “industry-funded climate disinformation” is not even remotely close to being true. The term has only ever been used once by Mann or any of the others there, so it is wrong to say they dismiss any opponent this way when they have only done it at most one time. And they haven’t even done it once, as is obvious to anyone who reads the entire quote. Mann did not say that the claim was wrong because it was “industry-funded climate disinformation”, he said it was for other reasons.

Furthermore, “industry-funded climate disinformation website” is a pretty good description of Tech Central Station. It’s certainly industry funded, and the we could discuss the disinformation part if Steve hadn’t banned that discussion.

Let me ask you this: Why is “tax payer funded” more honest that industry funded? Don’t those who recieve tax payer funds for their research have a vested interest in making sure they keep receiving the funds?

How about you actually discuss the science. All this worrying about who pays who distracts from the real issues. In fact, because of the constant “industry funded” cry from the AGW crowd, I’m more likely to say they’re unable to defend their science so they resort to ad hominem attacks.

This thread is about spliced data and the implications of such splicing. Where are your comments about this? Is this splicing a defensible thing to do?

Tech Central Station is not industry-funded research. It is not research at all, but a publication from a public relations company. That doesn’t mean that it is wrong, any more than an advertisement for Exxon is wrong. And of course Mann disn’t say that it meant that they were wrong — that’s just Steve’s misrepresentation.

There doesn’t seem to be anyone here saying that splicing data is correct so I’m not sure what it is you want to discuss about it.

1. Do you agree that Crowley is a "researcher in this field"?
2. Do you agree that these posts have demonstrated that Crowley "grafted" instrumental data with a reconstruction? If not, what step is lacking in the demonstration?
3. If (1) and (2) do you agree that Mann’s statement that "no researcher in this field has ever have ever… grafted the thermometer record onto any reconstruction" is false? and that it is not a "specious" claim?
4. Do you agree that Mann’s change of Crowley version between Eos 2003 and Jones and Mann 2004 does done intentionally?
5. Is there not strong circumstantial evidence that Mann was aware of the extended splicing in the Eos 2003 version and that was the reason for the change in version?

As to Mann’s quickness to dismiss opponents as "industry-funded disinformaiton", this is not an isolated occurrence in one realclimate post as you suggest. The comment in question was by Mann hinmself and not a random poster. The Wall Street Journal reported the following about Mann:

he has sought to debunk the debunking, and counter what he calls a campaign by fossil-fuel interests to discredit his work. "It’s a battle of truth versus disinformation," he says.

But that’s ridiculous. These days, scientists in the field prefer not to talk about the "hockey stick" anymore because of the sheer number of corroborating reconstructions; we now talk in terms of the "hockey team". They might be able to take one member of the team out of the game for a while with a cheap hit, but there are others that can easily fill in.

MJ: Is this just a big PR campaign?

MM: I’ll leave it to you as a journalist to investigate some of the links, some of the funding sources, and come to your own conclusions. Ross Gelbspan”¢’¬?he’s a former editor of Boston Globe”¢’¬?has written two books on the connections between industry funding, in particular funding by ExxonMobil, and these climate contrarians. The vast majority of them appear to receive funding from industry sources.

He attempted to interfere with publication of an article about us by Natuurwetenshap and did interfere saying the following:

Additionally we will speak out where we feel that the public discourse surrounding the science is being detrimentally impacted by the shrill voices and disinformation campaigns of the "partisan think-tanks or other interested parties".

Bradley says he is sickened by the coordinated and well-financed campaign to discredit the data he and others like him are generating.

So this is not a one off throwaway comment at realclimate. Mann has certainly tried to disparage me by personal comments relating to industry funding, which aside from being irrelevant, are, in my case, untrue. I think that his interference with Natuurwetenschap and with New Scientist was very unprofessional and I wish that you spend some of your bile on this.

My comment itself is about Crowley’s splicing and Mann’s account of that.

Steve, you have misrepresented what I wrote and what Mann wrote. The “specious claim” that Mann was referring to was the claim that the hockey stick was constructed by “grafting the thermometer record onto a proxy temperature record”. As you well know this claim is indeed specious. And Mann is also correct when he wrote that it usually comes from “industry-funded climate disinformation websites”. A quick search finds it, for example, at junksience.com and Envirotruth. Both of these are industry funded (see here and here) and are putting out disinformation (the claim that the hockey stick was grafted, for example).

I am also rether bemused that you claimed that a curve that ends in 1965 was spliced from 1965 on.

Tim, if you are blaming JunkScience for propagating this supposed mistruth, then you also have to blame yourself. After all you’ve reported what was said and then supplied a link. But that’s exactly what JunkScience did. The report is clearly in quotes and the link is clearly to John Daly’s old site, though I couldn’t find the original article being referenced there with a quick look. Blaming someone for quoting someone else is not a very logical thing to do. Particularly in a case like this where often the things quoted are things with which Milloy disagrees, but often doesn’t comment on, figuring his readers can figure out what links are the junk science itself and what are to comments on junk science.

However I might add that “calibrating” the proxies to the instrumental record is near enough to “grafting” it not to matter. That’s the effect, don’t you know, of the off-center PC thingee? Sure it’s a bit more complex than the simple splices discussed here, but constructing a replica of graph is not that different from simply grafting it.

Tim, the trouble with trying to debate things with you is your imprecision. It would save a lot of trouble if you provided actual quotations. For example, here I provided an actual excerpt from a comment of Mann’s with a URL. Repeating the except, it was:

No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, “grafted the thermometer record onto” any reconstruction. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation websites) appearing in this forum.

You have re-characterized this statement as follows:

The “specious claim” that Mann was referring to was the claim that the hockey stick was constructed by “grafting the thermometer record onto a proxy temperature record”.

This not what is at issue here: here Mann is talking about whether any researcher had “ever grafted”, which was readily disproved by the example of Crowley who had done exactly that and Mann’s awareness of this was evident from the changed Crowley version used in Jones and Mann [2004]. It is obviously not a “specious claim” as I have just shown that Crowley carried out the prcise “graft”.

Which curves are you talking about as ending in 1965? The CL proxy reconstruction in CL[2000] continued to 1982. As I mentioned before, there are two spliced versions – one with instrumental data spliced from 1965 on and one from 1871 on, with the earlier data from the reconstruction. I don’t understand what you’re bemused about. I don’t know why you don’t simply acknowledge the irrefutable.

Do you agree that Crowley carried out the exact splice that Mann denied that any researcher ever did?

The origin of the claim was the late John Daly’s seminal article:”The ‘Hockey Stick’: A New Low in Climate Science” found here

In the section “The ‘Hockey Stick'”, Daly wrote [my emphasis]:

From the diagram, the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age have disappeared, to be replaced by a largely benign and slightly cooling linear trend in climate – until 1900 AD.

At that point, Mann completed the coup and crudely grafted the surface temperature record of the 20th century (shown in red and itself largely the product of urban heat islands) onto the pre-1900 tree ring record. The effect was visually dramatic as the 20th century was portrayed as a climate rocketing out of control. The red line extends all the way to 1998 (Mann’s `warmest year of the millennium’), a year warmed by the big El Niño of that year. It should be noted that the surface record is completely at variance with the satellite temperature record [20]. Had the latter been used to represent the last 20 years, the effect would have been to make the 20th century much less significant when compared with earlier centuries.

Now Daly’s comment about grafting was not strictly correct, since he didn’t know at the time he wrote it (which I think was 2001, Jerry Brennan might confirm this) that the effect of including the bristlecone pine proxies and the incorrect mathematical treatment used by Michael Mann, produced the kink in the curve.

But Mann’s proxies ended in 1980 as Steve has pointed out. In order to complete the graph for the IPCC, he overlaid the surface record produced by his friend Phil Jones of the CRU onto the reconstruction he had made. From this overlaying, came the full Hockey Stick graphic from which the immortal lines of the IPCC TAR rang in newspaper headlines right around the world:

“The 1990s are likely to have been the warmest decade of the millennium, and 1998 is likely to have been the warmest year.”

this column starts with a quote from Michael Mann. Tim the Golden Bear starts off by denying that this quote exists, presumably on the basis that he can’t read !

With that telepathy so useful to the true believer, TTGB also asserts his intimate and perfect knowledge of what Mann has written, by denying that Mann rapidly characterises people as industry shills. If it weren’t for the tyranny of the written record which contradicts TTGB, we might even have believed the Golden bear.

I can’t help think that this would be the sort of idiocy that a nasty and spiteful person would love to highlight on his blog- and I even suggest a title.

John A., my point about the Crowley graft is DIFFERENT than the John Daly point, since it directly refutes the specific comment of Mann’s. I’m not trying to get into other people’s battles.

Crowley actually incorporated CRU data into his dataset. In Mann’s own graph, he showed the reconstruction and temperature in different colors. While the rhetorical effect was similar, he has argued that the distinct coloring ensured that this was not "grafting" as alleged by e.g. Daly.

However, he cannot apply this defence to the Crowley [2000] version, and, as I pointed out, there is ample evidence that Mann knew this – or otherwise why would have he changed Crowley versions between Eos 2003 and Jones and Mann 2004.

While the Daly quote may provide some historical context, it also muddies the narrow and precise point that I was making into the broader point about the rhetorical effects of these graphs – an interesting issue, but quite different than the one that I was discussing here. I am NOT simply making the traditional skeptic point and don’t want the two points confused.

Overlaying vs grafting. While I appreciate the difference, it does bring into sharp focus how presentation has masked content. In the case of the TAR SPM claim about “1998 being the warmest year of the millenium” it did not come from Mann’s reconstruction but from Mann’s presentation.

In any case, didn’t Mann use the CRU dataset to calibrate his proxies?

Maybe I missed it in the discussion above, but did Mann use the calibrated proxies in his hockey stick? If he did, that’s no different from grafting on the thermometer data since by definition it will mimic the thermometers. The only honest way to do it is to use an independent set of proxy data from the same time period and apply the same procedure as to the earlier historical proxy data.

Whatever the reason for the divergence, it would seem to suggest that the practice of grafting the thermometer record onto a proxy temperature record – as I believe was done in the case of the ‘hockey stick’ – is dubious to say the least.

The author of this comment is not referring to Crowley but to the hockey stick. This is what Mann is calling a “specious claim”, but you have repeatedly misrepresented him. And you won’t admit that there is anything wrong with this claim. Was the hockey stick constructed by grafting the thermometer record onto a proxy record? This seems to me to be untrue since the graphs are different, but Steve McIntyre doesn’t seem to have an opinion on the matter.

The CL curve shown in figure 2 in your post ends in 1965 but you claim that it spliced from 1965.

"No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, "grafted the thermometer record onto" any reconstruction.

I’m not misrepresenting him. I’m quoting him. Crowley is a "researcher in the field"; Crowley spliced temperature records onto his reconstruction. Mann’s changes in his spaghetti graph provide evidence that Mann knew that Crowley had carried out such a splice. Is the practice dubious? You bet it is.

If you look at the archived versions for Crowley’s figures in Crowley [2000] at WDCP, you can observe the splicing as described.

The EOs spaghetti graph does not provide an end date in the legend; from inspecting the original spaghetti graph in EOS, it is certainly hard to say that ended in 1965. The stripped version posted up last week as sent in by a reader may enable a little further decoding although I can’t say for sure that ends in 1965. Maybe someone who knows how to extract digital information from these graphs can resolve this, but I don’t see that anything turns on when the EOS version ends. Regardless of when it ends, it is almost surely the long splice archived at WDCP in which the instrumental is spliced onto the reconstruction beginning in 1871. As archived, the long splice does not end in 1965. However, if the EOS version with a long splice ends in 1965 as you suggest, then it is still another sui generis version of the Crowley reconstruction containing an instrumental splice from 1871 to 1965, and truncated in 1965 without any explanation. The illustrated proxy reconstruction in Crowley and Lowery [2000] ends in 1982.

I certainly do not exclude the possibility of another inconsistent grey version of this series – after all, this is the Hockey Team. But the proof of the Crowley splices does not rest on visual interpretations – the digital versions are complete and unequivocal proof. The digital versions seamlessly include both reconstruction and instrumental data. What’s so hard to understand?

because I think he actually doesn’t understand and hence makes all the gaffs. Ignorance is no sin of course, but once that is realised, how long is it going to take for it to sink in? Getting a few more caustic comments until the grey cells are forced to re-equilibrate from electrial overload I suspect.

In anycase more fun for you in Kanucka land with an election shortly in the immediate future.

OK, fine. I looked at three different graphs. The first is your figure 1 from Eos (EOS03), the second is your figure 2 from Rev Geophys (RG04), and the third one is from wikipedia (WIK05). The source for the Crowley curve for WIK is here. That link contains time series. The one graphed in WIK is CL2 which ends in 1965 and is not spliced. There is another one there called CL2.Jns11 which is Crowley spliced with the instrumental record. (Perhaps this is the source of all your confusion about splicing?)

I used the gimp to take screenshots of the PDF versions of EOS03 and RG04 and scaled all the images so that they were the same size. I then used select by colour, copy and paste into a new layer to get the WIK and RG04 versions of Crowley on top of the EOS03 graph and I could also drag them around to see how that matched up.

Results: the Crowley time series in RG04 is the same as in WIK — it’s the series CL2 which ends in 1965 and is not spliced. The Crowley time series in EOS03 is completely different — it’s not CL2 or anything like it. It appears to be MBH99 moved upwards. Presumably this is why in RG04 Mann wrote that the Crowley series in figure 1 was incorrect.

You’ve certainly managed to make a lot of mistakes in this one posting:

1. You falsely claimed that the Crowley series in figure 2 was spliced.

2. You falsely claimed that the Crowley series in figure 1 was spliced.

3. You falsely claimed that Mann dismissed the claim that the hockey-stick was grafted because it was industry-funded disinformation. In fact the claim is false, though you won’t admit it. And it does appear on industry-funded climate disinformation sites, though you won’t admit that either.

Just like to point out the following sentence from a recent paper by Esper et al.:

“Calibration including the exceptional conditions since the 1990s would, however, be necessary to estimate the robustness of a reconstruction during earlier warm episodes, such as the Medieval Warm Period, and would avoid the need to splice proxy and instrumental records together to derive conclusions about recent warmth.”

There is another one there called CL2.Jns11 which is Crowley spliced with the instrumental record. (Perhaps this is the source of all your confusion about splicing?)

OK, I provided a discussion of sources hereand specifically stated that CL2.Jnsm11 was spliced. CL2.Jnsm11 was used in Crowley [2000]. I’m glad that you agree with this. This is the end of the story- it is a splice of the temperature record ont a reconstruction.

As to my diagnoses of the provenance of the spaghetti graphs: I’ve obviously urged the provision of exact data citations to take the guesswork out of the origin of smoothed data versions. I think that the EOS spaghetti graph uses the CL2.Jnsm11 smoothed. If you send me your digital read of the graphic,I’ll check. I doubt that even Mann would have used MBH99 translated. Perhaps you could ask him if he made such an egregious error and then failed to lodge a corrigendum with EOS.

As to Jones and Mann [2004], it’s possible that the version in Jones and Mann 2004 ends in 1965 and is CL2 rather than CL2.Jnsm11.adjusted. I wish that they would provide proper data citations. If someone sends me a digital version,I;ll check. I’ll make any required edits.

Nothing turns on whether CL2 or CL2.Jnsm11.* was used in Jones and Mann [2004]. We know that Crowley used the spliced version CL2.Jnsm11.

If Tim is right and EOS2003 used some corrupted version of MBH99, then we would be unable to conclude that Mann “knew” that Crowley had used a spliced version CL2.Jnsm11. If someone can show me that the EOS2003 version can be obtained from displacing MBH99 as Tim surmises, then I will edit the above passage accordingly.

However, if CL2.Jnsm11 smoothed was used in EOS 2003 as I think, then Tim will presumably acknowledge with equal grace that Mann, in all likelihood, knew that Crowley had spliced the two in CL2.Jnsm11 . Perhaps someone can send me a digital version of the EOS2003 diagram and I will interpret it.

it will show that Mann was specifically aware that Crowley had carried out a splice.

“Mann and realclimate are obviously pretty quick to dismiss any opponents as simply being “industry-funded climate disinformation”,…”

2) TimLambert wrote:

“You falsely claimed that Mann dismissed the claim that the hockey-stick was grafted because it was industry-funded disinformation.”

Strangely enough, I cannot read (1) in any way which would allow me to see why (2) is justified.

Mind you, only tim could warp a straight quote from Mann into:

“but you have repeatedly misrepresented him”.

Yup, and I am sure that the corrigendum in Nature was only required because people misrepresented that the original materials and methods was defective; and that poor old Mann was misrepresented when we discovered that he had known about the dodgy R2 stats all along. So many misrepresentations, freely issuing from Mann’s mouth !

Hey, Tim; when are you going to read what Mann says in the first paragraph ?

Mann’s quotation rambles on about validating reconstructions by comparing them to instrument readings.

His words

No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, “grafted the thermometer record onto” any reconstrution.

contained the quote from John Finn, to whom he was responding. “Grafted” was Finn’s choice of words. I do not think that this is an issue of symantics, since the meaning of “to graft” is well known. It certainly is in the wine growing area where I live.

As far as vineyards go, even when grafted, the root stock (for example, from UC Davis) and the vine (specific clone) are spoken of as individual items even after grafting. Using this analogy, even overlaying an instrument graph on a proxy reconstruction could be considered “grafting” unless both were specifically and unambiguously identified in the graph’s caption.

‘Stock’ and ‘scion’ are the nurseryman’s, orchardist’s and viticulturist’s terms. The act of placing the scion in the stock is called ‘grafting’. And stocks from UCD are good ‘uns – a few of my babies may still be in the ground around there if’n I’m lucky.

But anyway, the atomistic quibbling here is amusing while I compile and transfer files, and quite heartening to see, in the context of considering what one must do to keep making a fuss in an increasingly hostile environment for fuss-making to get traction.

I was riding my bike this past Sunday, and found the dogs in a certain area all made a considerable racket, but none actually chased me, which was informative (I enjoy taunting dogs as they run along the road, because I can ride faster than they can run, usually; this was especially fun on a rez in Montana, because you never knew if cattle, llamas, or bison were on the road just ahead.).

Anyway, I presume we’re practicing here, but atomistic astroturfing is so, oh, 2003, don’t you think? Do you figger many more folk are going to fall for the diversionary atomistic quibble (DAQ) and not just ask about the warming thingy? I

Steve, you already have a digital copy of the graph in EOS03 — that’s you figure 1. You just have to look at the graph to see that the yellow and dark blue curves are parallel, but if you want to double check, all you have to do is open the image with Gimp or Photoshop, select by colour, copy and paste to overly the curves. And CL2, which is what is used in RG04, is not spliced.

Tim, it certainly appears line the first part of EOS03 matches MBH99 just offset, but after about 1400 the two converge rapidly. So it’s not just an accidental use of the wrong datafile. What is this anyway and who did what for what reason?

What is amazing to me about this thread, and many others, is how these “scientists” squirm and wriggle to avoid having to do what is normal practice in the commercial world. That is, be prepared to provide chapter and verse evidence – that will stand up in court – for any assertions/statements that you might make in a public arena.

I have said it before, but I will say it again, have a look at the due diligence practices that Directors and Officers are required to go through before they can make a public statement, for example in a prospectus. Anyone who has ever gone through the process knows that the Directors and Officers of a planned IPO company, for example, go through a rigourous process of due diligence. Due diligence is designed to provide a defence for the directors and officers if ever a court action were to result. The essence of the defence is that the directors and officers undertook diligent enquiries that a “reasonable man” would take to ensure that all statements in a prospectus are, to use Canadian terms “true, plain and fair” or in Australia, are such as to provide an informed investor, or his professional advisers, all of the material information that they would reasonably want to know in making an investment on the representations made by the company in the Prospectus.

The due diligence process includes lengthy sessions where lawyers hired for the purpose examine and question every statement in the public document, and require the directors and officers to provide evidence as to why they can make each statement. The process is called verification. The result is a well documented record of the process (usually filed in a number of ring-bound folders) that can be produced in court as evidence should a legal action eventuate that the directors and officers had followed proper process in making the statements that they do.

I realise that most scientists actually adhere to similar practices. However, it is increasingly evident that many “scientists” in the climate field pay no regard to such professional practices, and make statements without providing coherent backup data to support their statements. And we are not talking about sums of maybe $5 million that the public may be risking in an IPO. We are talking many millions, billions, and perhaps trillions of dollars of public money that is exposed. Surely the least we can ask is that scientists making such statements follow what has become standard practice in the commercial world.

“you already have a digital copy of the graph in EOS03 “¢’¬? that’s you figure 1. You just have to look at the graph to see that the yellow and dark blue curves are parallel,…”

so why are these two lines close together in 1630, and far apart in 1230 ?
shucks, who needs all these numbers and statistics ? Can’t you see that the earth is warming, and that global imperialism is to blame ?[/Dano]
sheesh
per

“Steve, you already have a digital copy of the graph in EOS03 “¢’¬? that’s you figure 1. You just have to look at the graph to see that the yellow and dark blue curves are parallel, but if you want to double check, all you have to do is open the image with Gimp or Photoshop, select by colour, copy and paste to overly the curves. And CL2, which is what is used in RG04, is not spliced.”

This is a graphical exampler of the logical fallacy that dogs are cats based on the numbers of their legs.

Pluueez!

This is the basis of your scientific analysis?

You are a scientific nincompoop!

This is no different to comparing entrails from Chicken 1 to Chicken 2.

“they are parallel for the first 500 years. After that the offset gradually reduces until the curves merge at about 1900.”

Ahh, so the curves are parellel, except when they are not parallel !

Here is a little experiment for you, Tim; you are an expert with GIMP, so it shouldn’t be a problem for you. Save the file. Look at it in Gimp, and blow it up to 200%. Now measure the height from the bottom of the trough at ~1250, to the top of the peak at ~1300. Do once for blue, and once for yellow. Now; compare the numbers you have. You may find that these numbers are different.

So actually, when you say the curves are parallel, maybe what you mean is that they are not parallel.

re: #59 Tim,
Well, Duh! That’s what I said. The question is why was such a graphic in existence? Was it a test to try to figure out how to graft one figure to another [g]? Was it a somewhat strange way of allowing for UHI? A new centering approach for PC analysis? What? And who did it and when? And why did it end up getting published if it wasn’t the proper graph?

The reduction in the offset suggests that it has something to do with the uncertainities which get smaller at the same time. The yellow curve looks to be a quarter of the way from MBH99 to the upper uncertainty i.e it’s MBH + 0.5 sigma. Looking in the data for the standard errors as well as two columns giving 1 sigma and 2 sigma I see two more columns labelled “IGNORE THESE COLUMNS”. The last column looks to be about 0.5 sigma, so I reckon that would give you the yellow curve.

I would guess that all the series were in a spreadsheet and the wrong column got selected for graphing as Crowley.

Can somebody volunteer to extract the digital versions from GIMP and email them to me? I’ll post up the data. I don’t have time to figure out to do a gimp extraction right now, although I’ll learn how in the future. If I have digital versions, I should be able to reconcile versions in a few minutes.

Excellent post. It is a shame that RC will not allow such a post, at least not in full. RC’s people need to provide explanations as to why we can not get access to the data, but they dodge the whole issue.

Wait TCO, Tim is going to put up an entry on his blog titled “Crowley F***s it up Again”, wait and see. Tim is always fair about these things isn’t he, I mean, you’d never find him complaining on one blog about behaviour that he is happy to tolerate from his own supporter(s) on his own blog. And this isn’t an important error anyway, as we know beyond any doubt that the temperature is soaring out of control because of AGW, it is less important that the actual data is properly treated than that it produces the right answers.

I think there is some justification for linking groups opposed to global warming climate change to industry (yourself excepted of course). For example the 2004 Exxon Mobil Worldwide Contributions and Community Investments lists the following contributions from Exxon. I have edited it to include only environment/climate change related contributions. There are most likely other contributions not listed as directed at climate change. (Steve, feel free to shorten the list if you find it takes up too much room).

I also note that there are some interesting entries on the list. For example The Congress of Racial Equality. Why they received $135,000 for climate change issues is beyond me. However the usual suspects are there.

Re: 63
Steve,
I may have done what you want. I’ve isolated Crowley-Lowery into a 28k jpeg file. It should be easy to get data points off of it. Send me an email if you’d like it. I didn’t know gimp but picked up enough to do this task.
I’ll explain how I did it in my email. I’ll be off the computer for a couple of hours while my wife is using it.

So we have a grand total of less than $3 million (if I added right in my head) spread among 30 some organizations? And how much, on a percentage basis is this of these organizations’ budget and how do they compare to the budgets of any of the big AGW-pushing enviro-groups? What was Exxon’s total sales in 2004? Couldn’t they have cut their advertising budget by .1% or whatever and doubled that amount?

Speaking personally, I’ve been the subject of various scurrilous and untrue attacks by the Environmental Defense Fund, falsely insinuating that I’ve been funded by ExxonMobil. The Environmental Defense Fund is linked to the host of realclimate. While realclimate attempted to minimize their associations, Mann distributed the defamatory Environmental Defense Fund attack to Natuurwetenschap & Techniek and perhaps New Scientist in attempts to suppress publication of criticisim of his work (“False Objectivity” perhaps?).

I looked up who the directors of Environmental Defense Fund were: its Chairman is N.J. Nicholas. Does that name ring any bells? Look where Crowley, Hegerl and others work – at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke, endowed by N.J.’s brother, Peter Nicholas, who has served as Chairman of Duke University.

But the big bucks are from the public sector. The US CCSP has a $2 billion annual budget. UCAR has an annual budget of $200 million.

And that was my point to John, Steve. 3 million among 30 groups is a drop in the bucket compared to both the size of Exxon and the size of the environomental movement. And it’s also pretty much a tiny part of the funding of the 30 groups themselves. IOW, I can’t see any of the groups changing their positions on anything just to please Exxon.

And even if any group or individual was strictly a mouthpiece for Exxon, which doesn’t seem to be the case, so what? We don’t judge data based on who the sponsor is, but on the quality of the data.

A few points which are relevant to the discussion on funding sources (#67-#73).

In 2005, the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology received total revenue of $4.6 million, of which 62 per cent came from US Federal agencies and 38 per cent from industrial corporations and institutes. The Program’s website emphasises that “the climate science input to the integrated activity is leveraged through approximately $6.2 million annually in federal research grants directly to faculty in the CGCS” (one of the two parent organisations of the Joint Program). Thus the $0.2 million identified as from Exxon is equivalent to less than 2 per cent of the funds available to the work of the Program from government, industry and foundation sponsors (including federal research grants to faculty in the CGCS). Among the listed sponsors from the US are the Electric Power Research Institute, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Administration, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Science Foundation. The Joint Program also receives sponsorship from corporations or institutes in Belgium, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands/UK and Norway. Those working within the Joint Program at MIT would object to being described as “an industry funded group that takes issue with the current scientific consensus on global warming.”

The list of groups which John Cross characterises as being in the latter category also includes the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, which received $0.025 million from Exxon. The council of academic advisers of this Joint Center includes scholars from Stanford University (3, including Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2), Harvard University (2) and the Universities of Chicago, Michigan, and Maryland. I have no doubt that these academics would also object to the AEI-Brooking Joint Center being described in the terms used by Cross.

No inference should be drawn, from the information I’ve provided above about these two institutions in particular, that I agree with Cross’s characterisation of other institutions.

Re #72. One of the lead authors of the IPCC Special Report on Emissions Scenarios was Stuart R. Gaffin, then of the Environmental Defense Fund. Gaffin is the first-named author of the Guidance Paper on the Downscaled Population and Income website at CIESIN at Colombia University: see link at http://beta.ciesin.columbia.edu/datasets/downscaled/ I strongly criticised the dissemination of these downscaled estimates in my presentation to the IPCC Expert Meeting on Emissions Scenarios in Amsterdam on 10 January 2003, saying that such a course “will be worse than useless: it will encourage researchers to base their research on faulty data.” In the Guidance Paper, Gaffin and his three co-authors (one of whom was subsequently selected as a Coordinating Lead Author of Chapter 1 of the Contribution of Working Group II to AR4) claim that “Recent criticisms of the SRES report have unfortunately created confusion and misinformation about the level of regional disaggregation used in the SRES report (Castles and Henderson, 2003a)” and that “Recent replies by the SRES lead authors have sought to correct the misinformation (Nakicenovic et al. (2003a) and Nakicenovic et al. (2003b).” The last of these citations is to a paper that does not exist, and the charges that David Henderson and I “created confusion and disinformation” are untrue.

john c
what is your point ? Some industry groups fund PR firms that support one point of view. Others fund PR that support a diametrically opposite point of view. Some industry is dependent on the global warming paradigm.

Greenpeace/FOE/etc fund large PR campaigns, and stand to gain substantial revenue from these campaigns. One could have a scientific view that they are sometimes Over the Top in their campaigns.

TCO, you seem to be very confused. The error is in figure 1 above and was in Mann’s EOS paper. Mann has admitted the error and corrected it in figure 2 above. On the other hand, Steve has not admitted his errors and has not corrected them.

1) CL2.Jns11 is a spliced series that is used in Crowley [2000]. No corrigendum has been issued for that paper.

2) My surmise is that a smoothed version of the long splice CL2.Jns11 was used in Eos [2003]. You suggest that it was an erroneous version of MBH99. In either case, no corrigendum has been issued for EOS [2003] and this spaghetti graph still gets cited.

3) You suggest that the truncated version of Crowley and Lowery [2000] ending in 1965 was used in Jones and Mann [2004] rather than the short splice Cl2Jnsm11*. This is possible, but it is a very incidental issue in terms of my post, which I have pointed out that I am prepared to edit, once I examine the gimp data.

4) If your observation in (3) is correct, this points to a slightly different issue in respect to Jones and Mann [2004]. They have used a truncated version of Crowley and Lowery [2000], which ends in 1982, not 1965 (see my earlier post on this). Arbitrary truncations by Mann of inconvenient series are something that we oberved in our first article in 2003 and another example here would not surprise. We’ve also seen the arbitrary truncation of the Briffa et al [2001] series in 1960, after which point it trended inconveniently down.

5) Mann said that “no researcher” had ever grafted. Regardless of which version is used in Jones and Mann [2004], the issue pertains to Crowley not to Jones and Mann [2004]. Crowley’s CL2.Jnsm11 is a splice of the exact type denied here. Mann has not issued a correction at realclimate of this point.

I don’t have a lot of energy to wade through mischaracterizations right now, so I would appreciate it if you made in responses in terms of the above numbered points.

1. I haven’t read Crowley 2000 so I don’t know how that series is used.

2. Your surmise is incorrect. This is obvious if you look at the graph. Mann has corrected the graph in a subsequent publication. I imagine that the mistake is not significant enough to warrent a corrigendum.

3. I said that the series CL2 was used. This was not truncated — it ends in 1965. I’ve already given you the link for this series. And if you look at the original graph (in the pdf) it’s clear that the curve ends in 1965 — you don’t need gimp.

4. Gee, Mann can’t win with you, can he? If he goes past 1965 with the series you attack him for splicing and if he stops in 1965 you attack him for truncating. There isn’t anything he could have done with that series that wouldn’t have drawn your ire. In fact, the series CL2 ends in 1965, so he didn’t do any truncating and the series wasn’t spliced.

5. Mann said that he wasn’t aware of any researcher grafting not that no researcher had ever grafted. And you keep evading the point of his comment — that the hockey stick was not grafted. Not that you will ever admit that there is anything wrong with the claims that hockey stick was grafted.

Steve,
I used your Fig 1A as a start. Under gimp I used filters -> colors -> decompose and picked CMYK under Extract Channels and unpicked Decompose to layers. Interesting resulting jpgs were eos2003.deconstructed-yellow_k.jpg and eos2003.deconstructed-magenta_k.jpg. The former holds Crowley-Lowery (CL) with a bit on its tail. I thought the magenta jpg showed that after, as it turns out 1977, CL had ended. It is hard to follow CL after 1887 when the Instrumental record is laid on with such a broad brush.

1. The two pertinent figures from Crowley [2000] are in my previous post on this http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=437 which you don’t appear to have read either. The spliced series CL2.Jnsm11 are clearly used. Your not having read the article is not excuse for the splice in the article.

2. I’m more inclined to think that Mann used the long splice in EOS 2003 rather than an erroneous version of MBH99, but will defer until I inspect gimp data. Mann has not issued a Corrigendum in EOS. If it was significant enough to correct, it was significant enough to issue a Corrigendum.

3. CL2 does not occur in Crowley and Lowery – which is what is shown in the lengend. CL2 does occur in the archived information for Crowley [2000], which you’ve not read. I discussed this series in my post here http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=437 in considerable detail. CL2 is a truncated version of Crowley and Lowery [2000], as I asserted. I’ve looked at the Crowley and Lowery [2000] figure in detail and it ends in 1982 not 1965.

4. The problems here start with Crowley. Crowley did not archive the version used in Crowley and Lowery [2000]. Problem 1. When Crowley did archive the series in connection with Crowley [2000], he truncated it – Problem 2. When he archived it, he also archived a spliced version – Problem 3. Ideally Mann would have used an archived version of Crowley and Lowery [2000], as he said in his legend.

5. I have said that the evidence for Mann’s awareness of Crowley’s splice is circumstantial, but still strong. The nature of Mann’s awareness depends on exactly what the Crowley version in EOS 2003 actually was. If Mann completely screwed up EOS2003 (Mann Screws It Up Again) and used a version of MBH99 (the Lambert Hypothesis, if you will), then I agree that Mann’s awareness is only of a cock-up in EOS 2003 and not necessarily of the Crowley splice. I submit that Mann was obliged to issue a corrigendum in Eos rather than merely do it correctly in Reviews of Geophysics. Eos 2003 is a wide distribution journal, whereas Reviews of Geophysics is not. I submit that Mann did not want to issue a Corrigendum. If the EOS version is related to CL2.Jnsm11, then I submit that that constitues indisputable evidence of Mann’s awareness of the exact problem. Let’s look at the digital data before filibustering on this.

Dave: I see, you are saying that the groups are only a little bit pregnant. My point was that they present a certain point of view and they have been funded by Exxon. Thus the title industry-funded climate disinformation is deserved. How much they receive is not really relevant.

Steve: I stated that I excluded you from this category. I will state again that I do not think that you are being funded by industry. But if we ever meet I shall happily fund you to the tune of a beer!

Ian: I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t. I thought about excluding the ones you mentioned (as well as some others) but figured someone would check up on me and criticize me for “cherry-picking”. However I did make note that there are some interesting entries on the list and I was serious about it. I can’t find any mention of climate change on CORE’s site. My comment about the usual suspects stands.

And if I said that, say, National Geographic were “communist funded” because it received goods or services from VietNam for a photo shoot, would that be a deserved title? And of course you’re sliding in that ‘neutral’ term “disinformation” without any justification. From my point of view it’s the warmers who are providing disinformation.

Re 81#2: Reviewing the bidding – we know that Mann has a screwup in the EOS 2003 figure somewhere. I think that Tim may be on the track of a yet another Mann screw-up by attributing to the yellow series labelled Crowley and Lowery as a variant of MBH99. A reader has sent me a digital version of the yellow series. I’m wondering whether the yellow series may be MBH99, mislabelled, rather than MBH99 plus an error margin, in which case it might be possible to locate the CL00 elsewhere, also mislabelled.

The series are heavily smoothed, making it very difficult to identify features. I have other things to do right now besides decoding this particular Mann screw-up. Once the error was identified, Mann’s obligation was obviously to explain the error to EOS readers, which he has not done.

I don’t have time or energy to sort out this particular screw-up right now. Maybe Tim or someone else can find out from Mann or one of the other EOS authors exactly which series is which in this figure and how they were calculated and we can return to this issue. I acknowledge that the actual Mann screw-up may differ somewhat from my attribution; however, there is a Mann screw-up here of some sort and it has not been explained.

Also there is a Crowley splice. If the actual Mann screw-up differs sufficiently from my surmise as to the screw-up, then the circumstantial evidence demonstrating actual Mann knowledge of the Crowley splice may be weakened (although this does not mean that Mann was not aware of the splice, only that the evidence may be weakened.) As noted above, this hardly restores Mann to good graces, since it merely shows that he was aware of an error in the EOS 2003 diagram – the exact nature of which we are still unable to diagnose with certainty – and failed to issue a Corrigendum.

Seven years on and I am finding little evidence that Mann and friends are able to acknowledge and correct errors or misunderstandings in some of their key papers….. Others in the field say “move on, move on”…..

How about some accurate accounting from within climate science of how various errors, ambiguities, etc. are to be resolved??

Sorry about adding some noise into the mix. I look forward to seeing your work when you get the data you need. It is just short of a crime, perhaps more than that, that you have to go to all this extra work to get it.

“Disinformation”, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “the dissemination of deliberately false information, … with the intention of influencing the policies or opinions of those who receive it.” In a press release issued at the UNFCCC Conference in Milan two years ago this week, the IPCC alleged that “In recent months some disinformation has been spread questioning the scenarios used by the IPCC as developed in its Special Report on Emissions Scenarios 2000 (SRES)”. The purveyors of deliberately false information were identified as Castles and Henderson (C&H), whose claims, according to the IPCC, had been shown to be “totally unfounded” by “some further detailed model runs” which had been carried out by Alan Manne of Stanford University and R. Richels of the Electric Power Research Institute. The results of the model runs in question had been published in a Working Paper by the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Reform, an organisation which I have now learned, thanks to the researchers reported by John Cross in #67 above, is an “industry-funded group.” It also turns out that Dr. Richels, the co-author of the Working Paper in question, is employed by the EPRI, which is one of the funders of the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – another body which bears the taint of Exxon funding.

The IPCC has never offered a scintilla of evidence for its baseless charge against Professor Henderson and me.

Ian: The word “disinformation” is used as a political propaganda word by totalitarian regimes to defend against unpalatable facts and reasoning made by dissidents.

I wonder why you don’t take some legal advice on the IPCC’s implied claim that you and David Henderson are engaged in “the dissemination of deliberately false information, … with the intention of influencing the policies or opinions of those who receive it.”

Tim, if your surmise is correct that the yellow series in EOS2003 is an MBH99 variant and not Crowley and Lowery at all, then the caption in Jones and Mann [2004] is also incorrect, where they say that the series displayed replaces an “incorrect version of Crowley and Lowery” used in EOS2003 and similar studies. If it was a variant of MBH99 as you surmise, it was not an “incorrect version” of Crowley and Lowery, but a perhaps correct version of a different series.

When you’re talking about the Hockey Team, it’s hard to tell the players without a program.

Dave: If the communist government of Vietnam gave significant funding to that particular photo shoot and the photo shoot produced only favourable reviews of the Vietnamese government, then yes, I think that the title would apply and we should be made aware of it.

Your comment about disinformation really gets at the root of the matter. If you would be interested in discussing this further I am sure I can find a suitable place for us to discuss it (since it is not really relevant to Steve’s work I would not impose here).

Nanny: Based on the posts I have seen of yours I would say that you probably already use that phrase.

Ian: Umm, there seems to be a bit of a stretch from saying that all the groups on the list receive industry funding (which they do) and saying that they “bear the taint of Exxon funding”. I thought I explained how I developed the list in my last post. I don’t really follow the rest of your post, but I assure you that I am not now, nor have I ever been a member of the IPCC.

And just what is “significant funding?” And what do you define as “only positive reviews?”

As for “disinformation” I don’t really have a need to discuss it further. You’re the one who introduced the somewhat odious term and if you’ll stop using it in reference to those who disagree with the warmer crowd, that would suit me fine. If you won’t, then I’ll leave it to Steve to decide when he’s had enough of such mud-slinging from you.

Thanks, Hans (#89) and John A (#90). I know that the IPCC’s allegation may well be defamatory, but I’m more interested in establishing that the information from David Henderson and me was not only not DELIBERATELY false, but not false at all. So far as I know, every economic statistician and index number theorist that has investigated this issue believes that it was (and is) the IPCC (not C&H) that is disseminating false information. David and I have made it clear that our argument that the SRES exercise was seriously flawed “is not only, nor even primarily, a matter of the particular emissions projections that the Report has generated, nor are the weaknesses of the SRES to be viewed as minor because they are not necessarily reflected, nor perhaps not at all reflected, in emissions scenarios that are inflated” (David Henderson, 2005, “SRES, IPCC and the treatment of economic issues: what has emerged?”, Energy & Environment, 16: 3 & 4: 563).

That said, there is a growing body of evidence that the emissions scenarios that the IPCC used to generate the 1.4-5.8 deg. C warming projection, and which it is using again in AR4, are technically unsound. The HoL Committee said that “several critiques show that [emissions] predictions could be significantly affected by the use of PPP exchange rates” (para. 72); and urged the IPCC “to go beyond making adjust ments for improved data. There is a need to reconsider the economic basis on which the scenarios are constructed” (para. 107).

Professor Warwick McKibbin of the Australian National University and Brookings Institution (a member of the Board of the Reserve Bank of Australia and of the Australian Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council) has advised me that:

“These scenarios in my view are biased by the underlying assumptions about the links between growth and emissions and are not reflective on how dispersed the future paths would actually be under alternative growth assumptions (in addition to the PPP debate) … The argument [used by the IPCC in dismissing C&H] must be that the PPP assumptions don’t change emissions much. I disagree with this as we have demonstrated and no-one that I know has challenged our results, except to argue that Manne and Richels don’t find our result in a model that can’t adequately test the proposition due to the nature of the model” (pers. comm., 1 December 2005).

And another leading Australian economist, Professor Peter Dixon of Monash University, has argued in a paper (co-authored with Maureen Rimmer) that:

“In our example, where China converges to [the Rest of the World] over a 100 year period, the MER-based simulation (simulation 7) shows a convergence-induced increase in the real GDP of China of 149 per cent after 25 years of the convergence process. In simulation 5, conducted under the same macro assumptions as simulation 7, but with technology gaps estimated with our preferred version of PPP [namely PPP-2], the increase in the real GDP of China after 25 years is only 96.25 per cent. If PPP-2 is the right basis for estimating technology gaps, then the use of MER-based analysis runs the danger of significantly overestimating convergence-induced growth in developing countries and thereby overstating environmental concerns such as the emission of greenhouse gases” (Dixon P.B. and M.T. Rimmer, 2005, “Analysing convergence with a multi-country computable general equilibrium model: PPP versus MER”, Energy and Environment, 16 6, November 2005, forthcoming: the paper was presented to the 8th Annual Conference on Global Economic Analysis, Lubeck Germany, 9-11 June 2005).

So far as I know the House of Lords Committee did not know of the Dixon & Rimmer study, which is far more sophisticated than the Manne & Richels working paper cited by the IPCC in its press release dismissing Castles & Henderson.

There are other reasons why the SRES emissions projections should not have been used for the temperature projections in the TAR and are unsuitable for use in AR4. For example, the standardised emissions of methane (CH4) for the OECD90 region reported for 1990 and 2000 for all of the IPCC scenarios (see explanation in Box 5-1 of SRES at http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc/emission/115.htm ) exceed the total of the emissions reported by the countries concerned to the UNFCCC for these two years by, respectively 18 per cent and 31 per cent. Similar information is not available for the other regions, but it is known that methane concentrations have ceased rising since 1999: cf the projected increases in the first three decades of the 21st century in all six of the IPCC TAR illustrative scenarios, all four of the IPCC TAR preliminary marker scenarios and the IS92a scenario used in the SAR, in Table II.2.2 of Appendix II of the TAR main scientific report at http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/532.htm .

The last of these reasons is sufficient in itself to justify the urgent reappraisal of the SRES projections recommended by the House of Lords Committee (para. 60). Although it cannot be assumed that atmospheric concentrations will not rise again in the future, it is clearly inappropriate that ALL of a set of scenarios that supposedly cover the full range of future possibilities should assume rising CH4 concentrations for the next 30 years, when these concentrations have now stopped rising during the past five years.

Umm, I hate to stand in the way of a good rant, but I will point out that it was actually Steve who introduced the term. I will also note that I never applied it to all those who disagree with warmer crowd; but there are some who do deserve it.

re: # 97 Well, you’re right that Steve “quoted” the term first. But he didn’t accuse warmers of producing it, merely accused them of falsely claiming that others did. AFAIK, you were the first person to actually claim skeptics spread disinformation within this thread, in post #82. If you’ll recall, you stated that since it could be shown that various skeptic or skeptic tending groups had received funding from Exxon (minor though it is) that therefore “the title industry-funded climate disinformation is deserved.” My subsequent complaint was that you slipped the term “disinfomation” in illegitimately. The logic of your statement is essentially: A therefore A and B.

Thus the powers of Exxon to disqualify someone’s work, reputation and career depend solely on whether they support the notion of Greenhouse warming/AGW. Anyone who comes into contact with such a pariah, either by writing or cooperating with him/her also transfers the deadly plague unless they support the AGW hypothesis, in which case they are “independent” and “progressive”

Dave: You seem to dislike the word “disinformation”, yet I would ask you how to describe the article I have referenced below.

I took as an example of disinformation provided by an organization on my list above the Heartland Institute’s New Study Confirms Dramatic Urban Heat Island Effect. In my opinion it has manipulated some data and has presented bits of studies in order to give an article that appears to show that the UHI is contaminating the temperature record. It begins with a reference to an article from the AGU. Unfortunately it did not give author or title and I was not able to track it down. However it continues with more studies to underscore their point.

For example another study they refer to is the one by David Streutker. If we look at the actual records for the area, we see that they are correct when they say that Houston did have almost a 1C increase in temperature between 1987 and 1999. According to the GHCN records the change between 1987 and 1999 was 1.02C. But in regards to UHI, lets look at some of the rural stations. For example Liberty is the closest rural area 54 km away and over the same period it showed an increase of 1.51C. However perhaps Liberty is in the footprint of Houston, so lets go to the next closest rural area — Danevang. Over the same period it showed an increase of 1.39C. OK, maybe even Danevang is too close so lots go Luling (225 km away). Its increase over the same period was 1.16C. SO their claim that urban growth caused the warming seems to be a little misleading.

OK, lets leave that claim and look at something else in the article. They claim that “Similarly, a study recently published in Australian Meteorological Magazine documented that the urban heat island effect artificially raises temperature readings in towns as small as 1,000 people.” Yes, that is correct, but of course the inference is that this is significant for the UHI effect. However to further quote from the paper:“From these records it is not possible to obtain an estimate of the influence of the UHI effect on historical temperature records.”

Finally, if we look at the last statement they say: “To affect surface temperature readings, “How big does a city need to be?” pondered NASA research meteorologist Marshall Shepherd. “The answer is still out there.”” Again, while the quote is correct, the context is not. Dr. Shepherd was not talking about the UHI effect in regards to temperatures but rather how UHI and pollution affecting climate particularly in regards to downwind precipitation.

So, this organization does present a distorted view of the scientific work that attepmts to show a UHI effect that the information presented does not support. That, to me, is disinformation.

Steve: point taken. I was merely showing that I did not introduce and I was only implying that you introduced it to this thread not that you created it.

“If we look at the actual records for the area, we see that they are correct when they say that Houston did have almost a 1C increase in temperature between 1987 and 1999. According to the GHCN records the change between 1987 and 1999 was 1.02C.”

Actual GHCN records John? And what about the Houston site the GISS records for which indicate a 1987-1999 change more than 20 per cent larger than the Houston site that you selected? Are the temperature data, via your source, all subject to the same adjustments?

I also note that there are some interesting entries on the list. For example The Congress of Racial Equality. Why they received $135,000 for climate change issues is beyond me. However the usual suspects are there.

Yes, it is interesting, but maybe that $135,000 has nothing to do with climate change. Exactly how was it designated as such so that you didn’t have it “edited out?” Of course, maybe it’s not that unusual of an entry. After all, climate change is an environmental issue, and we do have growing “environmental racism” issues in this country and arguably worldwide.

I also found it interesting that items like “University of Texas at Austin
Project Support (Climate Change Efforts) 50,000” are on the list. Based on what I know about UT-Austin, that specific $50k is spent promoting/researching ideas that many would consider anti-Exxon/anti-industry, and it’s probably not the only one on that list that would fall into that category. So there may be a lot of “balance” on that list.

Armand: Good point. I should look at others. How about the George C. Marshall Institute? They have a slew of documents that appear to be based on the Soon and Baliunas paper that was published in Climate Research. The one that the journal had to print a retraction about stating that the methodology could not support the results. The same one that the Editor in Chief resigned over after it was published.

John, I am not suprised that you wanted to stay anonymous to post such a slew of ad homs on anyone who might happen to oppose the “consensus” view, pity it is such a dishonest exercise.

If you are going to pick on Soon et al, why don’t you attack Mann, he knew his r2 results were insignificant, yet suppressed the information. Now that is disinformation on a grand scale. But you can’t can you, it is not allowed for the canons of the consensus to be undermined in any way. Pity about the science though.

Well, you see Ed, the warmers want to have a confirmed concensus established. But this is basically just a new form of uniformitarianism, much as the older science of geology had. But M&M have tried to disestablish this new view, with good success I think. At least the warmers aren’t willing to actually debate the problems. Instead they’re just left with their antidisestablishneouniformitarianism (eat dust Church of England!)

While waiting for John Cross to post a correction of his bogus “actual records”/”GHCN records” disinformation, shall we wonder how John arrived at the 1999 annual average temperature for Liberty, TX? Since actual GHCN records for Liberty’s 1999 temperatures are missing five months of data (you read that correctly), anyone who might take his comments seriously might be interested to see how long it takes John to fess up.

Re 111: Dave, perhaps off topic, but I note your interesting reference to unitarianism “much as the older science of geology had.” Knowing a bit about the field, I would take issue with the word “had”. A better word, in my view, is “has”. Example: S Warren Carey’s work on the Expanding Earth Hypothesis and Vladimir Larin and C W Hunt/L G Collins/E A Skobelin more recent support for that hypothesis AND provision of a mechanism. Example 2: John Elliston’s work showing many crystalline rocks have crystallised from colloidal muds rather than hot magmas. Example 3: The Big Bang theory of the universe, which as reported by Eric J Lerner, Harold Arp and Alfven have put huge holes in. This is classic Thomas Kuhn as described in “The Structure of Scientific Revolution”. My point is that it is still going on today in geology and many other areas of science.

“My point is that it is still going on today in geology and many other areas of science.”

Interestingly this is not entirely a bad thing. By having the “old school” so dogmatic and resistant to change, it forces the new turks to provide a strong argument, to the point of irrefutability. So that when there is a drastic shift, we know it’s the correct shift.

To put it another way, the problems that Mann et all have caused for Steve has forced Steve to work harder and strengthen his arguments. If Steve’s positions were poor they would have fallen apart by now, instead the more work he has done, the more it has shown his previous work to be robust. “That, which does not kill me, only makes me stronger.”

Of course the problem with climate science as it stands is that there are many powerful people eyeing everyone’s wallets and checkbooks at this point, that has to be countered now. Surely in 50 years our understanding of climate change will be better (anthropogenic or not) but we may well be broke by then.

Ray, from what I can see in a quick google-search, the examples you give are of lone cranks, not anything approaching a scientific concensus. The uniformitarianism (not unitarianism) I was referring to is the idea that things happen at a uniform pace and we shouldn’t look for phase-state changes, as it were, in macroscopic physical processes.

As I see it, this is what the hockey-stick seeks to reinstitute as the stick implies that things have been happening a glacial pace (or inter-glacial pace if you will) in climate change and that therefore a warming up of a degree or so in a century is inpossible to attribute to natural change and must therefore be assigned to changes humans have made.

Dave, my understanding of uniformitarianism was not that things happen at a uniform pace, but rather that the processes we see active today were also active throughout the past (i.e. the present is not a “special case” in terms of processes). Thus, by looking at the world as it is and as it operates today, we can make reliable inferences about the earth’s past. (Of course, once you get back to the singularity of the Big Bang, all bets are off!) I think (natural) variability remains the key issue, and it’s clear the time frames for that variability vary from extremely rapid to very slow.

Dave, I think you misuse the term “uniformitarian” as Jerry has mentioned. I think also that we be very careful about the use of the word “crank” in connection with people with currently unpopular views.

In many parts of science there are clear gaps of knowledge and theoretic understanding, where there appears to be a “consensus” but akso many competing hypotheses.

For example, in cosmology, the Hot Big Bang model has many gaps and some quite startling differences between theory and observation that have yet to be bridged. It is by no means certain that Lerner, Arp and Alfven are wrong in their critique of that theory, and that some of the inconsistencies of observation with theory that they have pointed out need to be dealt with.

Recently Thomas Gold died. He collaborated with Fred Hoyle and one other (whose name escapes me) in producing the “Steady State Theory” of cosmology as an alternative to the Big Bang Theory. Were Gold and Hoyle cranks? No, but they were certainly prepared to suggest alternatives to prevailing paradigms that were within the laws of physics and could be experimentally or observationally falsified. Hoyle and Gold turned out to be wrong – but that did not mean they were cranks.

I’ve heard Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick described as cranks, based on ideas of “scientific consensus” and “peer reviewed publication in recognized journals” even though the acid test in science is neither of those things but upon verification and replication.

Nearly every scientist who has ever changed a paradigm in science has been described in such terms, including those two Aussies who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine this year. Alfred Wegener was derided as a crank for years in geology.

My observation of cranks is that they tend to make basic theoretic mistakes which can be spotted quite easilybut refuse to entertain the idea that they could be wrong, and usually make vitriolic personalized attacks in response. As they are ignored and shunned they tend to see it as conspiracy by an “Establishment” to suppress theie views.

Can you see how easy it is to confuse cranks from dissidents of a flawed theory? In Russia, when a mountebank called Trofim Lysenko caught the attention of Stalin with a barely digested and wrongheaded biological theory based on Lamarckianism, it was the supporters of Mendelian genetics who were derided as cranks, and shipped off to labor camps and psychiatric wards. It is not for nothing that the Russian Academy of Sciences has drawn parallels between Lysenkoism and the political hothouse of climate science.

We have to be careful. Science is conservative by nature, but conservatism needs to be carefully re-examined and changed in the light of new evidence.

John, you don’t have to try teaching your grandpa to suck eggs. What you’re saying is correct but irrelevent in this case. I looked at some of what was published by the people mentioned by Ray and as I said, “from what I can see…” they’re lone cranks. I could be wrong as I didn’t looke exhaustively at their writings, but what I saw, which was on websites claiming to be by Carey & by Elliston at least, true scientific methods don’t appear to be in sight. More importantly, they’re not representatives of a large body of thought. Mann, etc. whatever we think of the quality of their work, are certainly representative of a large group of people.

The difference with M&M is that they have defended their positions via scientific methods. The disgusting thing is that their opponents, Mann in particular, have not been willing to discuss the issues but resorted to ad hominen attack and misleading or outright false statements.

Gold, Hoyle, etc. defended an established doctrine, perhaps past the point of reasonableness, but I’d never call them cranks. Likewise, I was quite happy to see defenders of the the old school of dinosaur extinction continue to argue their positions long after there were enough smoking guns for a comet/asteroid cause to start a small war. But a person needs to know something about the subject being discussed and be willing to go through his/her theory with an eye to the quantitative arguments over vague arm-waving.

BTW, I don’t think Jerry’s message had anything to do with mine. It’s only you and Armand who’ve complained about my definition of uniformitarianism. I agree with Armand that the word implies that presently acting causes were also active in the past, but the problem is that it’s assumed that the easily observable cause are ALL that are important. Thus things like ice ages and cometary impact would be ignored by the extreme uniformitarian. Even extreme examples of currently observed causes, like extreme bouts of volcanism or super hurricanes can be ignored.

At any rate I think the hockeystick crew tends to that attitude. Everything non-human must be very gradual and no rare natural events or trends can be used as explanation.

JerryB: Good call about the missing data in Liberty and I happily “fess up” to it. The data set that I was using posted a year average and I did not check the months. Looking at the surrounding years and surrounding areas I will leave it up to the readers as to whether the reported result is out of line.

I am not sure about your other points regarding the GHCN. Let me reiterate — the Heartland Institute reported a UHI effect of almost 1C. The rural surrounding area has more than a 1C rise. I don’t see how you can reconcile the two points.

Ed: Ummm, I appreciate your comments but I fail to see any ad-homs in what I have said. I did use the word disinformation but I feel that I have justified my point. You are free to disagree with my comments and present something to back you up (such as JerryB did), but I don’t see anything in your post that challenges what I have said.

I think Dave’s statement is correct — but Armand’s is correct as well. The first example of uniformitarianism that comes to mind for me is the case of J Harlan Bretz, who suggested that tremendous floods had affected the PAcific Northwest in ancient times. The Geological Society of America scoffed at this, being of the opinion (the consensus at that time, about 100 years ago) that “if you can’t see it happening, it didn’t happen.” They were “gradualists” and mockingly called Bretz a “catastrophist.” Decades later Bretz “found out where all the water came from,” and it turned out to be ancient Lake Missoula (filled with melted ice from the last ice age). Do a google search on “Missoula floods” if you haven’t read about these.

What’s really significant about Bretz, and Alfred Wegener, and Gilbert Walker, is that they bucked the prevailing consensus and turned out to be correct. I think of them whenever I hear someone talked about how “the vast majority of scientists believe…” — lately referring to AGW in many cases. Obviously there are lots and lots of skeptics — but even if Dave Dardinger or John A or someone else were the only person believing that — even if the whole world called him a crank — he might prove to be correct in the long run.
That gives me courage. And since I’m in such good company, I need a lot less courage than Bretz or Wegener or Walker needed.

John, it is your refusal to be impartial, bad science seems only to be on your radar if it is promulgated by those who are yet to be convinced of AGW.

Regarding UHI, the Torok paper (which I presume your reference above to an Australian paper) sure, doesn’t attempt to look at the time variance in UHI, however it does establish that a significant UHI effect (greater in fact than many of the putative temperature increases) can be detected at levels of population well below that where most climatologists assumed there was no effect. It is important as it shows that at least some of the assumptions behind the adjustments to the surface record are incorrect and the record should be re-examined in the light of new information. It also established that the effect increased with increasing population, and at least strongly suggests that as an urban centre grows, its UHI effect will grow as well. Yet you seem to believe that all is well with the surface record and no re-examination is required.

Re 118: Big call Dave. S Warren Carey and John Elliston are (were in the case of Sam Carey) VERY conscious of the need to follow robust scientific method. In my view, and I have studied the hypotheses that both advance myself, both Sam Carey and John Elliston provide robust scientific support for their positions. Do you think it is really fair for you to dismiss them both as “cranks” when you yourself admit that you know almost nothing about what either is saying?

A “consensus” of “scientists” said that Copernicus was wrong (Galileo too) when he said that the earth rotates around the sun!!

The further point that interests me about the AGW crowd is that their claims for “consensus” are never(almost anyhow – never is at strong word, but I haven’t seen any compelling numbers) never backed up by verifiable numbers!! A serious claim for “consensus” would surely provide detailed statistics of polls taken, taking into account the credentials of those offering their opinion to do just that.

It seems clear that the literature search that finds not one dissenting article must (again from my own amatuer observations at least) be flawed!

Re #118 and #122. S. Warren Carey (1911-2002) was decidedly NOT a crank: he was an honoured Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science: see biographical memoir at http://www.science.org.au/academy/memoirs/carey.htm . In his paper “The Skeptical Archeologist”, presented to the Australian National Academies Forum conference on “Australians and Our Changing Climate: Past Experiences and Our Future Destiny” on 25 November 1996, the late Professor Rhys Jones of the Division of Archeology and Natural History at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University, referred to Carey as follows:

“Wegener (1915), conscripted for the entire duration of the Great War, nevertheless managed during one leave (1915) to propose his theory of continental drift … This theory was either ignored or ridiculed for half a century until eventually confirmed by palaeo-magnetic research during the late 1950s and early 1960s. This rehabilitation was led by primary research done in Australia vy the charismatic Sam Carey (1955) of the University of Tasmania, and Ted Irving (1958) at the Research School of Earth Sciences at the ANU.”

Jones cited Carey’s “Wegener’s South America-Africa assembly: fit or misfit?”, 1955, Geological Magazine, 92L 196-200. Later in his paper, Rhys Jones, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the AAH representative on the Organising Committee for the Conference, told the meeting that “the climate in the early Middle Ages … was much warmer than now. Oats were grown in southern Greenland, vines in north Yorkshire and cattle were taken across Alpine passes from south Germany to northern Italian markets. I still hold a sceptical view that proponents of the ‘global warming’ theory need to demonstrate that the recent climatic changes are outside the range of normal variability – not over the narrow time scale of the past century, but over the thousand years or so for which we have, at least in Europe, good environmental indicator historical records.”

I just spent a bunch more time looking at Carey’s theories and I still don’t think much of them. It’s possible that he was trying to be scientifically accurate, but it looks to me that he became overly geometrically ridgid (literaly and figuratively) and if he was converted at all to a more standard plate tectonics, it happened very late.

It also established that the effect increased with increasing population, and at least strongly suggests that as an urban centre grows, its UHI effect will grow as well. Yet you seem to believe that all is well with the surface record and no re-examination is required.

You’ll want to show that the positioning of the GHCN site – usu identified with an ICAO designation, is being biased by the UHI. Trot out a paper that has examined this.

It is child’s play to find increased effect of temp with increasing population, but it is far harder to show that the heat is carried all the way out to the measuring site. UHI effect stops at the concrete, esp in irrigated fields. Ask any bike rider.

It is child’s play to find increased effect of temp with increasing population, but it is far harder to show that the heat is carried all the way out to the measuring site. UHI effect stops at the concrete, esp in irrigated fields. Ask any bike rider.

Re: #118
I usually agree with just about everything Dave writes, but I’ll just clarify my understanding of “uniformitarianism” a bit. I think the modern usage has evolved from the 19th century usage to focus on processes. IMHO the “u-word” includes current processes having occurred in the past at much larger scales (e.g. floods today -> Missoula floods; meteorites today -> “dino-killers”; glaciers today->Ice Age glaciation). Again, I’m not appealing to authority on this — it’s just my usage.
I agree with Dave that Mann et al are arguing that past variation is similar to the variation of the 20th century, but I suspect this may have more to do with showing B > A by diminishing A (where B is very recent temp rise and A is past episodes of temp rising), rather than a general inclination to gradualism.

Re #125: While UHI may drop off “at the concrete,” water in the soil helps retain heat (and thus acts as UHI); compare irrigated fields with desert. Seems to me that the correct “base state” for UHI measurements is wilderness rather than cultivated fields.

My other points regard your pretense to be using actual GHCN records as your source, some possible side effects of your actual source, which you still have not specified, and your cherry picking between two Houston sites.

JC: “Let me reiterate – the Heartland Institute reported a UHI effect of almost 1C. The rural surrounding area has more than a 1C rise. I don’t see how you can reconcile the two points.”

I am not endorsing that article, but I distinguish between what it says, and what it does not say. Was the reported “UHI effect of almost 1C” annual, or seasonal, or what? The article does not say. If it was only on hot summer days, it would not be very noticeable in annual averages.

There are also start/end point problems with the discussion. If instead of 1987-1999, they were 1985-1997, would we be discussing an urban cool island effect?

It is child’s play to find increased effect of temp with increasing population, but it is far harder to show that the heat is carried all the way out to the measuring site. UHI effect stops at the concrete, esp in irrigated fields. Ask any bike rider.

Since HCN stations are being discussed in this thread, I thought some might be interested in a paper by Christopher A. Davey AND Roger A. Pielke Sr. http://blue.atmos.colostate.edu/publications/pdf/R-274.pdf
They included pictures of about 10 site locations. Seems they surveyed about 50 sites (10 of them HCN) in E. Colorado and found a significant number of them that fail to meet WMO exposure standards.

If you are aware of a link to a GHCN location number- ICAO designation cross reference, please post it. BTW, while many GHCN “locations” are airports, many are not.

My overarching point, JerryB, is the confusion between intensity and extent.

Folk can talk about intensity all they want, but it’s the extent you want and as soon as you get out off the pavement, the extent stops, esp. irrigated fields, esp.esp. irrigated fields with a large clay fraction. There are even variations within cities where temps are much lower in parks [to illustrate my point further].

So the next step is to determine whether the stations used in the GHCN are outside of the UHI or within it. That is, you want to find a paper that has quantifed something along these lines. Hint: DMSP night-time lights. Another hint: area needing research – esp. if one wants to continue the tout about UHI biasing, because th’ ev-dence don’t show nothin’ like that. But vagueness, in this instance, helps make a tout.

Ed: Re the Torok paper, actually your guess is as good as mine. The HI article never gave a solid reference to it, but from their description I assume it was. However my point remains unchanged. Recall what the HI article said:

” …. Urban population growth, rather than any external warming, explained the rise in temperatures in and around Houston.

Similarly, a study recently published in Australian Meteorological Magazine documented that the urban heat island effect artificially raises temperature readings in towns as small as 1,000 people”

I do not think the Totok paper supports this position.

JerryB: Review the first part of my quote above from the HI article (Urban population growth …). If you accept that the GHCN numbers are generally correct then is this statement true? If the GHCN numbers are so inaccurate so as to be useless, can the above statement be supported? If the UHI was only on hot summer days, is it fair to claim that the rise in temperatures was due to it as opposed to external warming? You raise interesting points, but is there enough information in the article to answer them? Remember the initial premise of my argument — that this article presents a point of view that can not in fact be supported by the science.

As I mentioned, I am not endorsing that article. Questions regarding quantification of UHIE can be interminable. The simple question of whether you will accurately specify your source of data that you falsely attribute to GHCN should not be interminable.

Are there problems with GHCN numbers? Yes indeed. There are a variety of problems. As I mentioned in another thread:

“For example, in the collection of temperature records called the Global
Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) there are over 250,000 conflicts of
0.5 C, or larger, of reported monthly means of over 2,000 locations.

There are many pitfalls for the unwary user of such records.”

There can be additional problems if you use another source, but falsely attribute to GHCN what you get from that other source.

For example, the actual GHCN monthly means for Danevang, TX, for 1987, in tenths of degrees Celsius, are as follows:

Yes, two sets of numbers, and for reasons other than those of the conflicts mentioned above. Does either set fully match the numbers of your source? I doubt it. If you average each set, will either average match the 1987 annual number provided by your source? Place your bets.

I wish you good luck in comprehending complex issues accurately while you exhibit an apparently persistent inability to be accurate in dealing with quite simple matters.

The clay fraction is a function of the water holding capacity of the medium [more clay/silt, greater WHC, but clay drains slower and keeps HOH longer] & that’s any soil textbook, irrigated fields is latent heat of evap, which is phys/ag textbook stuff, the off-pavement part is basic in the literature…

The clay fraction is a function of the water holding capacity of the medium [more clay/silt, greater WHC, but clay drains slower and keeps HOH longer] & that’s any soil textbook, irrigated fields is latent heat of evap, which is phys/ag textbook stuff,

My understanding was that the greater water content leads to greater heat retention during the day, with higher temps/more heat radiated at night, hence “U”HI effect. Could you provide a link showing that’s not true?

the off-pavement part is basic in the literature…

Seems like this is the same issue. The link you gave shows a nice schematic curve that seems to show that irrigated fields are cooler than rural areas w/o fields, but I couldn’t find any discussion or data supporting it — a link showing the data behind this schematic should also cover my request above. Thanks.

My understanding was that the greater water content leads to greater heat retention during the day

But soil takes longer to heat [thus not gaining as much total energy as pavement] because of:

– the properties of water, [e.g. why is beach sand hotter than your garden soil? less water content]
– the shading from plants/furrows/uneven surface,
– some of this is a function of albedo,
– bare soil having lower density and thus less total heat capacity and retention – that is: the soil itself not getting as warm as paving thus not radiating as much heat and having inherently lower heat content and capacity, etc.
– the air over soil having plants on it is cooled by evapotranspiration [ET].
– Buildings would have a better angle of incidence to receive solar energy too.

Thus bare soil/soil with plants on it/vegetated areas are not as warm as pavement and cities, therefore a UHI.

But you can test this yourself by remembering from your childhood that on a hot summer day touching asphalt is bad, but touching dark soil is less bad or even not bad at all, and that even at night the asphalt is warmer than the soil. Or, if you live in the desert, you find snakes on the road because the road is warmer than the soil. Or the beach sand on your toes being cool just below the surface…anyway,

So if I understand correctly, you are looking for a link that is a specific basic reference stating that soil is ‘cooler’ than concrete/asphalt. How about this [viz. tbl 2].

And you are also looking for a specific basic reference that supports the optic I provided that says irrigated fields are perhaps slightly cooler than rural areas. My assertion was that irrigated fields are much cooler than pavement, the effect is immediate, and I believe I’ve sufficiently backed that assertion.

But, if I can find data while quickly skimming a text or two tonight – say, in enough time while making dinner and walking around between stirring, I’ll provide it but I would suggest if you are curious about specific data behind a figure, contact the source of the figure. Or any other sources that use the well-known figure, which likely off the top of my head comes from here and Akbari is the man in this field.

I think the thing is that while soil is cooler than concrete in absolute terms, that doesn’t mean that it cannot maintain / support a UHI effect. Thus a preserved garden in what was once a rural area but is now a part of a growing city can absorb more heat that it did before because of the warmer air in the urban setting. This isn’t to say this hypothetical garden contributes as much to the UHI as concrete does, but it wouldn’t decrease it.

I’m not sure what you’re saying. Certainly parks in the center of large cities are warmer than the countryside. That’s fairly well understood.

The issue here is whether UHI biasing is at work in surface temp stations, or whether the temp stations are sited sufficiently far from UHIs that the bias is avoided. A sub-issue is whether any bias is corrected in the record to allow continuity.

The work done so far shows surface temp stations are sited sufficiently far from UHIs that the bias can be corrected and does not overwhelm the majority of stations [in developed countries this is more of an issue than in non-1st world countries].

The majority of the historical literature shows that a slight UHI influence is detectable but not responsible for the entirety of the increase in surface temp records. A recent paper states that they found most stations are sited away from UHIs, my implication in 125 and 134 above.**

The point is, the big-piccie literature is fairly robust. Certainly there is work to be done to precisely quantify the magnitude and extent of urban heat islands, boundary layer effects on urban microclimate, etc. but the big picture knowledge wrt surface temps is fairly clear. Certainly there is next to no empirical evidence stating otherwise to this point, AFAIK.

JerryB, I am glad that you accept my premise that the article in question should not be endorsed. I feel that it presents a point of view that is not supported by the references it contains and I further feel that I have shown that quite clearly. With that said, the issue of the temperatures becomes moot, however I will dig up my reference tomorrow and post on it. You are free to dissect it as you wish.

I am somewhat amused by your closing statement since I have been staying on topic while you seem to have a fixation with the GHCN data set, which, if you are not willing to endorse the article, is somewhat irrelevant. But whatever works for you.

So if I understand correctly, you are looking for a link that is a specific basic reference stating that soil is “cooler’ than concrete/asphalt

No, sorry for not thinking about that interpretation. I certainly agree that concrete/asphalt works quite well for heating; I argue that the UHI effect extends *past* the “end” of the concrete (albeit at lesser magnitude) to include e.g. farm fields. Thus, my understanding that irrigated fields contributed some “U”HI vs. fallow fields and vs. undisturbed wilderness.

My assertion was that irrigated fields are much cooler than pavement, the effect is immediate, and I believe I’ve sufficiently backed that assertion.

I certainly agree with that; my understanding was that you were arguing a broader claim, that the UHI effect stops at the edge of the pavement. To me, that means that when you hit the edge of the pavement, temps drop immediately to wilderness levels. As I wrote, I had understood that non-wilderness rural areas such as irrigated fields, although cooler than pavement, were still warmer than actual wilderness.
The schematic in your link, http://adaptation.nrcan.gc.ca/perspective/images/Figure2_UrbanHeat.jpg, is exactly the type of info I was looking for. However, I am still unable to find it or the data behind it by searching on the site, and the home page headings don’t seem to provide any obvious clues. Since schematics are nice, but actual data is what really counts, I’m very interested in finding that.
You note that

I would suggest if you are curious about specific data behind a figure, contact the source of the figure. Or any other sources that use the well-known figure, which likely off the top of my head comes from here and Akbari is the man in this field.

As you were my source for the figure, I contacted you. 🙂 Since I’ve never seen the figure before, the fact that you say it’s well-known doesn’t really help in finding the data.
Thanks in advance for any pointers to finding the data, or articles that support the UHI ending at the pavement.

JohnA better not be frigging editing my remarks. I’ll only take that from the big guy.JohnA replies: I haven’t edited your remarks. I have however put some of your zingers from time to time in the moderation queue for Steve to assess. Get over yourself

I’m glad to see someone else noticed the crude reactive superficiality of Michael Mann trying to dismiss criticisms of his work as though all issues come from shills for evil Capitalist lackeys of Big Oil.

Often there is only the one string on Mann’s banal instrument. Marcuse’s book “One Dimensional Man” can now be re-dedicated as…..